A Life Never Lived
by love-cerise
Summary: 5 things that never happened to Alex Rider and 1 that did, in no particular chapter order. AU mostly. Crackfics and drabbles. Ch2 up! "Minimum Wage, or How Alex Needs to Get a Job."
1. High School Blues

A/N: I do not own Alex Rider. Nor do I own High School Musical.

First tentative step into the Alex Rider fandom. Haven't read the books in a while, so please forgive if anything is out of character.

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01. We're So Not in This Together

It was too late to pretend that he had calculus homework. And on a Friday night, no less.

He'd heard better lies from even _MI6_, and that was certainly saying something. Alan Blunt's perpetual falsehoods had destroyed all credibility whatsoever that he had started out associating with Britain's secret service. Solving indefinite integrals and finding limits was just a little bit less distasteful, less self-deceiving in comparison.

Alex wasn't quite sure if it was stupidity or plain carelessness on his own part that had momentarily possessed him to agree to the entire damned thing in the first place. In retrospect, he figured it was a lethal combination of both and that he could have been doing something worse instead of watching over-processed American teenybopper fare.

Like getting drowned or dissected.

Or having his person subjected to numerous tools of torture.

Or getting involved in guerilla warfare in South America.

Or throwing himself into gathering intelligence in a civil war that was not his to fight.

Nope, Alex Rider was content as he could possibly be with an evening at home with his guardian and her boyfriend of two months and counting. But that certainly didn't mean that he wasn't going to take issue with 'movie night,' which the lovebird duo had coerced him into.

"So…High School Musical 3 at your age, Eagle?"

His innocent inquiry was immediately refuted with a passionate defense from aforementioned SAS trooper, citing nostalgia for the formulaic Disney musical of olden days as well as Jack's promise that _he_ could pick the movie this time. ("_Whipped_." Alex whispered.)

"There's no shame in watching Disney films. I like to stay in touch with my youthful side." Eagle insisted vehemently as he popped the _collector's edition_―there really was no hope for him, Alex realized― DVD into the player. "See? Nary a wrinkle on me!"

O, the wonders of modern scientific advancements, the least of which were time-release retinol creams.

"You don't really need to do this for my benefit, you know. I'm _seventeen_, not twelve. And I'm sure my peers aren't half as juvenile as teen flicks portray them to be."

"You give me too much credit, Cub. Act your shoe size, they say."

"…" Alex refrained from further commentary on tiny feet and how immaturity was _not_ equivalent to the fountain of youth, but he wisely kept his mouth shut as his guardian walked in with the homemade popcorn; Jack had warned him to be nice to her new boyfriend anyhow.

(God knew _those_ didn't quite last for long, and Alex had the feeling that this would be no exception either. But for different and worse reasons, considering SAS members' life expectancies.)

"And Jack likes it anyhow." Eagle was saying. "Or rather, she sort of fancies _Zac Efron_."

"Jack likes what?" Jack asked, eyeing them with a suspicious look that promised much interrogation.

Eagle dove for the popcorn, and Alex more sedately took a handful. "Nothing, I was just commenting on Eagle's tastes in contemporary cinema. Or perhaps, the total lack of thereof."

Jack's eyes lit up in realization as she settled down on the couch. "Oh, are we watching 'Mean Girls' again? I think he has a bit of a crush on Lindsay Lohan."

Alex choked on a generously buttered kernel.

It took him a good time to get over near-death by popcorn, and Jack's incessant pounding on his back didn't quite help matters either. By then, the opening music was already playing across the screen as Eagle sat transfixed.

The man was sprawled in an ungainly fashion across a good part of the couch, with Jack nestled against his side―an admittedly endearing couple by all measures of the word, even if Alex had expressed a little concern over Eagle's suitability as a boyfriend giving his dubious occupation. Jack, in a rare fit of indignation, had called him the pot calling the kettle black.

Eagle's arm looked as if it was in a rather uncomfortable and numbing position, Alex noted with no little amusement, what with the way it seemed permanently entrapped between Jack and the back of the couch. If anything, he was quite glad that he was spared from the trials and tribulations of having a romantic interest.

"You're asexual, I suppose." Tom had diagnosed importantly that one time Alex had cluelessly and accidentally offended a girl trying to ask him out. "Although that sort of doesn't make sense, especially since you're a sp―"

"Don't compare me to Bond." Alex had protested with righteous crossness, and had left the subject at that.

And now, currently, it was always there at the back of his head. A veil of despair, stretched taut and taunting over his heart, beating in cadence with the sounds of his own fears.

_You…Are... Not... Able…. To…. Love. _

Wouldn't love, couldn't love, should have loved when he was still alive and with every limb and his mind intact, which was more than he could have hoped for. But he had never. Not like Jack and Eagle, not like Tom and the chick he fancied from eighth period chemistry, not like the cloyingly sweet couple around which High School Musical was centered.

"Oi, Cub? Earth to Cub?"

"Mm?" The spy spared Eagle a glance, and was relieved to find that he had stopped mouthing the words to every catchy pop-rock number. Surprisingly, Eagle sang as well as starring popstress Vanessa Hudgens―right through his nose.

"Aren't you in senior year too? Like Troy and Gabriella?" The older man queried, all the while jabbing his index finger at the TV. "Why don't you ever do fun stuff like this?"

…Who were Troy and Gabriella, anyhow?

In all probability, M16 would have taken issue with his spending excessive amounts of time on vapid drama productions after school instead of training. Training his body would be much more conducive to his continued survival in the field, as a sniper would hardly care if he went flat or not. Singing wasn't exactly his cup of tea either, if his tone-deafness (a genetic curse, as neither Ian nor John could sing) was any indication.

"I'm a football player." Alex only offered, eager not to provoke any worrying from Jack. "We don't do musicals. We do…goals."

"But _he_ does both!" Eagle made a vague gesture towards the handsome visage of the main protagonist, who seemed to be experiencing a psychedelic episode in the darkened halls of his high school. And all in lyrical verse, too.

"That's different. He's Disney. And a basketball player. They do baskets. And…" Alex peered at the screen. "…why is he singing and falling all over the place?"

Surely there were better allegories to teenage angst than vertigo?

"It's called a _musical_ for a reason, Alex." Jack sighed, snagging another handful of popcorn. "And it's a plot device."

But Eagle was frowning.

Alex had the gut feeling that he certainly wasn't going to leave the topic alone to die, and that Jack would be perfectly accepting of any intervention on her boyfriend's part in making her ward act more like a typical schoolboy and less like the spy he was.

"It's called expanding your horizons, y'know. You're young, and you have your entire life in front of you. So it's fine to try new things, especially since you might not have so much time or such an opportunity later on to do so."

"I _do_ have a life, thank you very much. And I'd actually like to keep it."

And Eagle giving advice on life and ambition in general was somewhat disturbing, especially because he knew that the man was trying to keep his best interests in mind. K-Unit was not known for its displays of affection, despite the unit's close-knit comaderie.

"You mean you've never done anything remotely exciting." Eagle huffed.

"Like something exciting along the lines of base-jumping into Scorpia territory?"Alex suggested.

"Yeah, exactly―wait, what? What the hell were you doing near bloody _Scorpia_?!"

"Base-jumping?" Jack looked understandably confused. "Is it dangerous?"

"Classified." Alex smirked, and took the last of the popcorn. "The usual song-and-dance. And Tom's older brother goes base-jumping, so it's not all that bad."

"Hmph. Well, if you're not going to tell me that…do you have a girlfriend?" Eagle persisted doggedly.

Alex quirked an eyebrow at Eagle's and Jack's entwined positions. "I'm not into you like _that_. If you're into threesomes, go look for, I dunno, Wolf. He'll be more than willing, I think. He can keep a girlfriend like he could keep his glares to himself."

Jack guffawed, and her boyfriend scowled menacingly and muttered about teenagers nowadays.

"But you're not answering the question, Alex." She said pointedly.

No doubt fraternizing with spies had improved her observational skills by a tremendous amount, Alex thought with chagrin. Ian must have taught Jack a few necessary things.

"You know…with the stuff I do, it's hard to find time for _anything_." He hemmed and hawed, eliminating specifics in favor of a less damning statement.

"How about a daily planner or a Blackberry, Cub? Keeps your schedule organized and your priorities straight."

Alex groaned. "It's not about finding the time, it's me not having any time, alright?"

He was fairly sure that Eagle was not being deliberately obtuse, but rather was attempting to draw out further details and keep the conversation going before Alex intentionally led it into a dead end.

"You do realize that they're methodically romanticizing the high school experience, right? I mean, where's the drug dealing?" Alex pressed. "And teenage pregnancy?"

But Eagle had already thrown himself into cautiously planning a counter, and watching High School Musical 3 was forgotten in favor of Operation: Make Cub Make The Most Of His Youth.

The first item on the list, apparently, was getting a girlfriend.

And after Alex skimmed the rest of the neat spreadsheet in Excel, he figured that Eagle was truly off his rocker, if the SAS trooper had gone so far as to look up the names of all the girls he had been in regular contact with and somehow manage to calculate his compatibility of them.

"…99% compatibility with Sabina Pleasure. 98% with everyone else. 100% with Wolf. If you're going to fix the statistics, at the very least please make it a little less obvious."

"I aim to please, Cub."

Alex sighed and deleted the file, and went even further on to permanently clear the contents of the Recycle Bin, much to Jack's amusement.

The second spreadsheet and its accompanying data was a good deal better, although Alex wasn't quite sure if he even wanted to apply to college as his side-job as a spy was looking more and more like a permanent career with every mission he completed.

"Brown University is a very nice school!" Jack protested, in quick defense of her undergrad alma mater. "And if you're in the States, MI6 can't get their hands on you!"

Alex and Eagle exchanged significant looks, before Eagle shook his head. "Doesn't work like that, sweetheart. That's not going to stop MI6 from finding him."

"And then we'd be paying tuition for nothing because I'd never be in class, and you know how it costs an arm and a leg to attend a private university." Alex said noncommittally.

His mind churned with the multiple possibilities of his future, none of which included higher education in any institution of the academic sort. It would be asking far too much for Malagosto to take him back, and they didn't offer recognized degrees that translated into practical transferable skills for any decent profession. That was, in any other major than sabotage, corruption, intelligence and assassination.

"How about Oxford, then?"

"My grades aren't quite that good." Lack of attendance tended to do that to even the most conscientious of students.

As for the school itself, Ash had said that John Rider had went there, and he wasn't going to be a mindless follower all of his life, even in an ironic search for self-identity. And post-GCSE, he wasn't very confident in his chances of getting into such a top-notch university.

All roads led back to one singular path already set in stone, and he was fairly sure that it was sooner than later that his death would suddenly occur, culminating a life never truly _lived_.

"Cambridge?"

That edge of anxiety that smothered him every time he told her he was leaving on a mission; It was only as of recent that a note of silent desperation had entered her tone.

_I only want you to be happy_, she would say plainly, but even that gave him very little to work with. He'd never dreamed of a future without her, but at the same time he would never even have one without M16.

It was nearly pathetic, he thought, in a sudden burst of clarity how displaced he was from the day-to-day existence of normal teenagers with teenage responsibility.

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"I got accepted into Cornell University." Tom confided to Alex as school let out.

It was like a wash of color over his grayscale vantage point of the world, as he blinked and tried to take in what was happening to his small corner of existence.

It was ripping apart so nicely apart at the seams, that was what was finally happening.

"You're leaving England?"

"I figured I'd head aboard. Maybe my parents might even learn to get along if I wasn't running interference every so often."

"Cool." Alex had always felt a world apart from his peers, but this new lack of communication with Tom was startling and unwelcome after solitary confinement in a prison cell on his last mission.

The usually firm grip that he had over his emotions was inexistent today, as Alex felt misplaced resentment pool within him. That resentment welled into anger and jealousy, before being quelled by resignation.

"Congrats, mate." The spy said sincerely, not wanting to "rain on Tom's parade," as Jack would have said in one of her frequent senseless American-isms.

"Thanks―it's the best school I've made so far, and admissions this year seems pretty tough."

What to say, what to say? Alex had never prided himself on tact, and his sharp tongue had often led to Jack accusing him of not having a sense of self-preservation. "Um…What are you going to be majoring in?"

Safe question that didn't display his ignorance, harmless if unfamiliar territory.

"Engineering Physics. It was either that or Mechanical."

Alex couldn't remember the last time he recalled Tom having an interest in anything remotely pertaining to engineering in general, and bitterly caulked it up to not being enough of a best mate to the only boy who knew what he was going through.

"As long as it isn't bioengineering." It reminded him of insane, skewed genius, of Point Blanc, and he left all that unsaid due to respect of Tom's not needing to be dragged any further into what he was doing.

"Bioengineering?"

"Classified, sorry." Alex said with a grimace. "Feel free to speculate, but MI6 won't let me say anything."

He'd never be able to read the chapter on genetics and cloning in their standard biology curriculum without breaking a cold sweat. And despite the fact that the entire incident with that sick, sick school was a good few years ago, remembrance always brought to mind the fragility of his presence in the world. Having an artificial construct as a replacement for everything he lived for, he stood for…

"Alex?"

"Sorry. Just spacing out."

What in bloody hell did he live for and stand for, anyways?

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Please r&r.


	2. Minimum Wage

Disclaimer: I do not own Alex Rider.

A/N: Crackfic, 2 years after Scorpia. Part of what I will expand later on into a multichaptered fic. I've always wondered what it would be like if Alex decided to go rogue and take matters into his own hands...

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02. Minimum Wage

To taste reality in a fingernail, and depression in a bomb; glimpse danger in a heroic tale, and death at the hands of some sadistic sob.

Alex stared at his nail beds. He really should have stopped chewing _before_ it started hurting, but that little bit of common sense had obviously not been apparent at the time. He reckoned that all those times of being knocked unconscious on missions was finally taking its toll or had caused some sort of brain damage that the doctors hadn't picked up on.

Doctors depressed him; if they were around, it was fairly likely that he had been wounded in some unfortunate way or another. Alex uncomfortably adjusted the gauze that was still wrapped around the nether regions of his torso, underneath the scratchy cotton of the regulation uniform. School depressed him. MI6 work depressed him.

As much as he would have been content to remain in an unenlightened state of childhood, kept ignorant by real adults of the real-life equivalent of monsters that hid under the bed…at a grand old 16 years old and a few years' worth of espionage, there was no mistaking the frantic way Jack hid the bills and spent so much time out of the house as of recent times. Alex had appreciated her thoughtfulness, but he'd figured that it wouldn't hurt to be aware of the household's fiscal situation before 'the shit hit the fan,' as Jack would be inclined to say with her American colloquial mannerisms.

He sighed, even as Tom subtly nudged him to pass the note down the aisle to the kid sitting in front of him.

"Psst. This one's going down to Damian."

He was going to need to get a job, if only for paying for smaller household purchases. Ian's finances were stellar by right of his risky occupation, but Alex wasn't quite so shortsighted to believe that whatever was left in the bank would tide him and Jack over for much longer than a few years. MI6 was not offering him a salary for saving the world several times over; They had grudgingly picked up his considerable insurance and medical tabs, but otherwise left much of the financial aspect of his affairs to himself and Jack.

Which was actually quite bloody stupid, because if anything Alex would have assumed that keeping a rein on financial freedom would be a be-all and end-all method of curbing any rebellion from anyone.

Alex dutifully scratched out the notes that the teacher was writing on the blackboard, and returned to speculating on what job openings there would be for a minor with no college career and little marketable skills of any sort that didn't involve espionage. Stocking shelves at the local supermarket wouldn't be such a bad alternative, but a fixed schedule was the last thing that he could adhere to.

"As you can see from the downwards slope from left to right, the demand curve for a commodity is negative," Mrs. Price was explaining, and since it had been a good week or two since he had last been in school, Alex Ride felt quite compelled to actually _try _to listen, despite being distracted by the stab wound that pulsed with fire.

In hindsight, it wasn't too intelligent of him to refuse the medication that the doctors had offered him for his latest injury; Being impaled by a harpoon by a seafaring smuggler tended to be rather painful, but he hadn't trusted MI6 not to slip something else in with the pills to ensure his future loyalty.

Macroeconomics didn't precisely provide any sort of redeeming value for him in his current field of work, but on second thought he reckoned that trading stocks or even internet marketing on the side would be a source of passive income that he couldn't possibly overlook. He made a mental note to investigate online sources of income.

"…Mr. Rider?"

Alex paused in mid-thought.

"Yes, ma'am?" What kind of super-spy was he, that he hadn't detected her nearly breathing down his neck?

"Daydreaming, are we?" She stated frigidly, and Alex observed the way her lurid red lipstick transferred itself onto her front teeth with every word.

Alex carefully crossed his arms over his notebook, hoping that his distracted doodles of soccer balls would go unnoticed before realizing that attempts at concealing anything looked unnatural and an experienced, tenured teacher like Mrs. Price would be fully acquainted with the signs of student guilt. Assuming a casual slouch, he leaned back in his chair to stare her in the eye.

"Would you like to give the class an example of the law of supply and demand?"

Mrs. Price wasn't fond of him, and somehow was always giving him opportunities to give errant answers that he usually took advantage of to keep his reputation as an overall delinquent adolescent. (Alex supposed that this was what his past captors had meant by him having a "smart mouth" on him.)

"The sex industry." He said aloud, aware that all eyes were on him. "As long as there is demand from wankers who can't get any, there will always be a supply of underaged teenagers being smuggled in by trafficking rings from third-world countries to work the brothels."

Tom snickered, and he wasn't the only one.

Alex supposed that it would be prudent to stick with his image even as Mrs. Price barked at him about crude language, but even then the topic of the illegal adult industry struck a little too close to the last mission that he had completed. Perhaps Alex should have said something about drug-dealing, to keep his cover?

"Mr. Rider…I believe that not a single word has made it through your thick head during this entire period." Mrs. Price sniped, before closing in on a daydreaming Tom. "Can you give a working definition of the supply and demand model for Mr. Rider's benefit?"

"The law of supply and demand predicts that the price level will move toward the point that equalizes quantities supplied and demanded." Tom quoted, straight from the textbook that fortunately lay open upon his desk.

Alex rolled his eyes. Alright, so perhaps he took it _too _literally.

Needless to say, he could firmly testify to the tenement that there was demand for everything and anything. MI6 work had borught him too close for comfort to the questionable margins of human depravity and creativity, and there was always demand for certain things of disreputable value.

Like killing people.

Yassen Gregorivich had made a living off it. Heck, there was lots of money to be made in the industry of offing people, if Scorpia was any representative of that.

One simply does not start up a crime syndicate, Alex mused as he continued to lazily fill in the margins of his notebook with fanciful constructs of imagination.

There was definitely more to such a large-scale production then mere aggregation of resources, monetary or otherwise.

Connections of the people sort were advantageous, as were networking skills…that wasn't to imply that the masterminds behind Scorpia were social butterflies by any means, though. If anything, Major Winston Yu was a pushy conversationalist who got on people's nerves.

And an assortment of competent colleagues didn't quite translate very well into liquid wealth, even if everyone did grudgingly agree to pool their assets; Joint ventures came with their complications, and Alex could personally attest to the amount of backstabbing that he had witnessed while on one mission or another in the crime underground. And it really did make for a simmering mess of bureaucracy, with certain delegated tasks carried out by various self-serving personages. It certainly created a self-containing atmosphere of ego clashes, which would be highly unproductive.

And overconfidence had nothing to do with it, although Julia Rothman had been somewhat nearsighted regarding her underestimation of him.

After all, there still needed to be a body of disposable, multipurpose human resources to play bodyguards and hitmen and overall grunts whom had the responsibility of the day-to-day upkeep of a crime syndicate's dirty work. Alex briefly wondered about the legalities of putting a binding contract out until he realized that they probably weren't worth anything if Yassen managed to skirt disposing of him one too many a time.

But they all knew how that ended up.

Which brought him to thinking about recruitment of talent, and Alex had to agree that crime syndicates and occupational training facilities like Malagosto were hotspots for sowing young unemployed assassin-wannabes. (Jack had candidly mentioned once how Ash couldn't hold a desk job for a week.) The hard-core image of organized crime in general did much for the image, if the influence of certain bits of popular media were any indicator. Tom still watched "The Sopranos" reruns on a regular basis, after all.

Alex smiled and jotted down the next heading that Mrs. Price wrote on the board; What were the chances that he could become a bigger force in the 'license to kill' job market than MI6 or Scorpia?

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"It's called supply and demand, like what Mrs. Price was talking about in class. Just more…literally." Alex had tried to explain over a Reuben sandwich at lunchtime. "If there wasn't a demand for someone to be killed or something horrible like that, Scorpia would be out of business and wouldn't supply their clients with assassination services."

"…So you're going to start a _gang_?" Said best mate voiced in disbelief, as Alex motioned for him frantically to keep his trap _shut _and the half-chewed baloney off the cafeteria table.

"No! Well, _no_. But it _is_ a profitable niche." The spy told him, exasperated. "Well, at the very least, if it were done right. But I'm not going to start up a gang."

Somehow along the ways to explaining his plans for world domination he had managed to confuse Tom, who had actually been present for every Economics class that they had that year, with Alex attending just a little over five of them.

"I dunno. It sounds a bit _off_ to me…didn't you say that you didn't want to do anything like that anymore?"

"…I don't." But giving how his own motivations stacked up, Alex was not entirely convinced that he would ever be able to completely forsake saving the world; Having two relatives whom had been in the business was fairly good indication that some part of it was probably due to breeding, and through no fault of his own.

"Then why?"

Was it really so much to ask for a little compensation and a little less MI6 control-freak tendencies for saving the world?

"Well, we are in a global economic crisis right now…."Alex winced, hoping that it didn't make him sound the way he thought he did, like a common gold-digger.

And self-gratification in know that he was there to protect innocent people as he should have been protected, but he wasn't going to say that to Tom.

"Get a sugar daddy, why don't you, Rider." Tom rolled his eyes. "We_ all_ need to buy new cleats for the next football season, too."

Alex ignored that. "There's demand for eradicating organized crime and stopping trigger-happy arseholes from bringing civilization to a halt. It's only the national intelligence agencies and the black ops like CIA and M16 that are really dealing with the supply part of it all."

"…So you're somehow going to start something that's like a gang?"

"Not a gang. It's anti-gang." Alex tried again. "It'll crush criminal activity before it happens. Before MI6 wastes times dithering with paperwork; they are awfully ineffective, you know."

Like not sending backup to one of their best agents, therefore putting a valuable asset at risk―Alex was sure, 2 years after the entire Point Blanc affair, that he had smashed the thresholds of their expectations for him tenfold, which would have meant quite a loss in their efficiency if he had died back then.

"Like killing everyone in Scorpia before they blow the world to smithereens?"

Alex frowned. "Something along the lines to that, but not exactly. No assassination, just mostly interfering with their plans. Something like what MI6_ tries_ to do, just without the manipulations and underhanded techniques."

"Fine, then a for-profit vigilante group with multiple Batmen that target criminal groups like Scorpia?" Tom asked incredulously. "And I don't believe you'll get anything done with such a…_humane _approach. From what you've told me, they probably won't stop until you off them."

The Batman reference was nice, but he'd like to think that he had better style. And Alex hadn't really thought of the word _vigilante_, but it was definitely fitting.

"Not _just _Scorpia. Crime lords and smuggling rings and Yakuza once I find them. Which isn't quite difficult, considering how I have very easy access through MI6 to much of the big-name criminal population in the world." Alex nodded, pleased that the point had finally made it across the Monday-torpor that affected half the school population and subsequently Tom as well.

"…Nice try. Good luck explaining that to M16 when they see that you went rogue. You can always be like Boba Fett, you know." Tom said doubtfully. "And how will you work out pricing?"

"Being a bounty hunter means working alone. For all I'm doing as a spy, I have no political power and very few resources at my disposal, and MI6 wouldn't like me freelancing for, say, the Australians. So seceding altogether seems like the best thing to do in my situation."

As much as he abhorred admitting it, Alex was certain that he would never be able to accomplish it on his own.

After Tom's lukewarm response, Alex decided that it would not be in his best interest to mention it to Jack. She did have something against him taking up arms for the better good, although he had a feeling that it was more of M16's blackmail and the danger of his missions that had her reaching for her steak knife.

Besides, he was failing Economics 101.

But contrary to popular belief, Alex Rider was more than an overly articulate, druggie brat who knew karate and various forms of self-defense.

And he was going to save the world on his_ own_ terms, this time.

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Please R&R.


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